In this seasonal immersion with Isla Macleod, we step into what it means to meet this fertile, abundant, eros-filled threshold where the land has fully awakened, and something in us stirs awake alongside it. Together, we explore Beltane as a living field of relationship, one that invites us into deeper intimacy with our bodies, our creativity and the more-than-human world.

These special seasonal episodes move between reflection, story and gentle ritual invitation.

At the heart of this episode is a remembering that “we are collaborators and co-creators of life unfolding.”

Beltane becomes an invitation to turn towards what enlivens us; to follow the subtle currents of desire, sensation and beauty. To slow down enough to feel the world again, listening to the body as a site of knowing and allowing the inner artist to emerge.

As Isla shares, “When we witness beauty, our natural response is to create beauty in return.”

There is also something playful and tender in this… stories of dancing with the stag beneath the moon, of gathering blossoms and making ritual with what is already at hand, of allowing life itself to be the ceremony, with a gentle loosening of the idea that ritual needs to be elaborate. What matters is attention, presence and willingness to be in relationship.

This is, as with our core intention at Rooted Healing, an invitation into intimacy with Life. Into what Isla names so beautifully as “making love with creation.”

You might listen while walking, while sitting with a tree, or simply letting the words move through you. However it meets you, may it soften the edges of separation and remind you of your place within this living, breathing world.

With special thanks to the music in this episode, from Mango Lassie, Telling the Bees, The Children’s Forest, Mae Bird and Cynefin.

Learn more about our courses and gatherings at rootedhealing.org

Support us on Patreon

Sima Basel is a Palestinian-Ukrainian therapist and the co-founder of Grassroots Village, an emerging eco-village in the mountains between Oman and the UAE.

We spoke about multiplicity and what it means to hold different lineages, different histories, different griefs in one body, whilst rooted to the land we find ourselves in. About the quiet, often unnamed longing for belonging that so many of us carry.

Again and again, we came back to this question of disconnection as something lived in the body, in the nervous system, in the way we organise our lives. The ways we’ve been taught to heal as individuals, while living in systems that keep us separate from land, from each other and often from our whole selves. Even the disconnection that happens between our many parts.

What Sima is building through Grassroots Village feels like a response to these longings as a living inquiry into what happens when we begin to orient differently.

There’s something in this conversation about remembering. About noticing where healing itself can become another identity… another thing to “do”… and gently returning to something more honest underneath. And also, something about grief. How it moves when it’s shared. How it softens when it’s witnessed. How much we’ve lost the spaces that know how to hold it.

Learn more about Rooted Healing.

The music in this episode is from Cynefin, Bonnie Medicine and Ojhro.

Spring Equinox greetings dear ones,

In awe of the sun’s return, I’ve been marinating in the gusty sea breezes moving across the farm. Gentle wind with the occasional passionate gust has always felt like Spirit talking to place or talking to me. We named our lost baby Awel, which is the Cymraeg word for such a breeze as this. The air of spring is the kind that seems to rearrange our thinking as much as the hedgerows, blowing away the thoughts that no longer serve. After a dark, wet, harrowing winter, slow craft with hands in rhythm of thread, fibre, spindle and loom has offered a balm for my soul. Of remembering how to stay in relationship with time rather than racing ahead of it, helping me integrate the winter with tenderness.

In this Spring Equinox episode, I’m joined once again by ceremonialist Isla Macleod, with another immersive episode woven with music, ritual, lore and practice, as a way of honouring the turning of the Wheel of the Year.

The equinox is often spoken about as balance, as light and dark in equilibrium, but I’m not sure balance is ever still in that way. It feels more like a moment of active negotiation, a living recalibration. A threshold where forces are shifting, adjusting, testing each other.

And perhaps that’s the real invitation of this time of year: to stay in conversation with what is stirring without rushing toward emergence. To notice where the land is leaning toward light, and where winter still has a voice. To sense the subtle thresholds we ourselves are crossing, sometimes quietly, sometimes reluctantly.

This episode is an offering into that space of listening as a companion for attuning to the land, the body and the deeper seasonal intelligence moving through both.

You can learn more about Isla’s work here, and explore what we’re tending at Rooted Healing.

The music in this episode comes from the beautiful work of Bonnie Medicine, Cynefin, Telling the Bees and Ojhro - all artists who are also in conversation with land, memory and lore.

If the episode resonates, we’d love to hear what is stirring for you this season.

With heart,

Veronica